OLD_CURMUDGEON, I haven't checked in with that community in a long time, so no, I don't know. However, Forth Inc is still there in Manhattan Beach, and there are still newsgroups and other online communities.

OLD_CURMUDGEON, I wondered if anyone would respond to my mention of FORTH. I worked for Forth Inc when they were designing software for the first handheld tracker for FedEx. It was an interesting time.

I've used a few graphical tools for generating code and they are quite good, not to mention that you also have an extra level of documentation. There's a free tool that performs fairly well, devFlowcharter. Perhaps the real natural language would be graphical?

It's really ironic that you mentioned FORTH. I was thinking that also, but opted for a more "ancient" language to demonstrate my point. I remember purchasing a book on FORTH years ago when it was the language du jour, and reading through much of that book, I decided that FORTH was not for me. Never finished the book either.

Fast forward a few decades. I was cleaning out my personal home library, and came across the book on FORTH. And, so I added it to the pile of books to be donated to the local public library. Maybe someone else is capitalizing on my largesse, but I expect that it is collecting dust on the shelf titled, "Arcane & Esoteric"

While I realize it's NOT the same, when I read the title and the beginning text, the first thing that popped into my mind was, OH!, WOW!, they've upgraded COBOL to the 21st Century, since if one knows the classic COBOL, it pretty much "read" like a novel. IF ever there was a wordy language, COBOL was it.

Chuck, we already have systems that will take a system level diagram, with details of the interfaces provided by the user, and generate code. These are very seldom used. I worked for companies that did this, for example Rational (now a part of IBM). So, I wonder if a natural language system would be used.

At the higher level, fourth generation languages allowed easy access to data. I am dating myseld here, but the most successful was Focus. We had secretarties that could put together complex queries and reports with this, with reasonable training. If you limit the domain, you can do this. Of course, that is only becuase someone has written basic code to implement what you want to do.

Good point, Charles - it is always harder to debug someone else's code. I wonder if it generates comments along with the code. I know it's still in its infancy but it will also have to get a lot better than 70% accuracy to become useful.

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It won't be too much longer and hardware design, as we used to know it, will be remembered alongside the slide rule and the Karnaugh map. You will need to move beyond those familiar bits and bytes into the new world of software centric design.

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